16 June 2013

So unimaginably different

From Autumn Journal

by Louis MacNeice

Now
we are back to normal, now the mind isBack to the even tenor of
the usual day,Skidding no longer across the uneasy camberOf
the nightmare way.We are safe, though others have crashed
the railingsOver the river ravine; their wheel-tracks carve the
bankBut after the event all we can do is argueAnd count the
widening ripples where they sank.October comes with rain whipping
round the anklesIn waves of white at nightAnd filling the raw
clay trenches (the parks of LondonAre a nasty sight).In a
week I return to work, lecturing, coaching,As impresario of the
Ancient GreeksWho wore the chiton and lived on fish and
olivesAnd talked philosophy or smut in cliques;Who believed
in youth and did not gloze the unpleasantConsequences of
age;What is life, one said, or what is pleasantOnce you have
turned the pageOf love? The days grow worse, the dice are
loadedAgainst the living man who pays in tears for breath;Never
to be born was the best, call no man happyThis side
death.Conscious - long before Engels - of necessityAnd
therein freeThey plotted out their life with truism and
humourBetween the jealous heaven and the callous sea.And
Pindar sang the garland of wild oliveAnd Alcibiades lived from
hand to mouthDouble-crossing Athens, Persia, Sparta,And many
died in the city of plague, and many of drouthIn Sicilian
quarries, and many by the spear and arrowAnd many more who told
their lies too lateCaught in the eternal factions and
reactionsOf the city state.And free speech shivered on the
pikes of MacedoniaAnd later on the swords of RomeAnd Athens
became a mere university city,And the goddess born of the
foamBecame the kept hetaera, heroine of Menander,And the
philosopher narrowed his focus, confinedHis efforts to putting
his own soul in orderAnd keeping a quiet mind.And for a
thousand years they went on talking,Making such apt remarks,A
race no longer of heroes but of professorsAnd crooked business
men and secretaries and clerksWho turned out dapper little
elegiac versesOn the ironies of fate, the transience of
allAffections, carefully shunning the over-statementBut
working the dying fall.The Glory that was Greece: put it in a
syllabus, grade itPage by pageTo train the mind or even to
point a moral For the present age:Models of logic and
lucidity, dignity, sanity,The golden mean between opposing
illsThough there were exceptions of course but only exceptions
-The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.So the humanist
in his room with Jacobean panelsChewing his pipe and looking on a
lazy quadChops the Ancient World to turn a sermonTo the
greater glory of God.But I can do nothing so useful or so
simple;These dead are deadAnd when I think I should remember
the paragons of HellasI think insteadOf the crooks, the
adventurers, the opportunists,The careless athletes and the fancy
boys,The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled
scepticsAnd the Agora, and the noiseOf the demagogues and the
quacks; and the women pouringLibations over gravesAnd the
trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta, and lastlyI think
of the slaves.And how anyone can imagine oneself among themI
do not know;It was all so unimaginably differentAnd all so
long ago.